And the weather was lovely

In early November, Phil’s approval for the Southern Journey finally came through, and the process of dropping fuel depots increased the pilots’ workload. RAAF squadron leader Douglas Leckie faced one of the greatest challenges of his career. Having flown Bill and Peter out to a staging depot at the north of the Prince Charles Mountains, he landed before realizing that he’d put the plane down in drifting snow which hovered over a crevassed area amidst blue ice. Unwilling to take off with passengers, he dumped out the survival tent and food before taking off, planning to return with better visibility to find a safer landing. He refuelled at Mawson and flew back to the depot by himself, but there was no trace of Bill and Peter—or even a sign that they had ever been there. He searched until he needed to refuel, went back to Mawson, refuelled and returned, scouring the white ground with tired eyes. Peter and Bill had just the barest of survival gear in snow-covered crevassing.

 

Doug Leckie at the Beaver controls

Syd arrived back at Mawson at the same time as Doug landed the Beaver for the third time, ashen grey, deeply distressed, and very fatigued. Syd and Jerry Sundberg joined the hunt as Doug fretted that he was no longer sure where he had left Peter and Bill. Syd spotted them through a gap in the twenty-feet-deep drifting snow, where they’d been all along, able to hear the aeroplane above them the whole time Doug circled. Now the problem was that there were five men to get home. Against Syd’s suggestion that he would get out with more gear and stay the night with the other two, Doug simply refused to leave anyone there.

The overworked plane took off into the mountains, with its nose pointing down in the full-flap altitude. At that site they established 250-mile depot, or Southern Depot, over the next few weeks, knowing that, as much as they would have liked the aircraft to be available for support while they were sledging, the Mawson landing strip was on a sea-ice surface that was about to disappear.

At the Southern Depot, Doug and John constantly dumped supplies, seal meat, human food, fuel, and spare parts for the weasels. The field party switched to thirty-hour cycles. A five-man party was assembled. Bill Bewsher, as party leader, Peter as geologist, Lionel Gardner, the senior diesel mechanic, John Hollingshead, the radio technician, and Syd as navigator and surveyor would travel with two weasels and lightly laden dogs. On Sunday, 18 November 1956, the Mawson expeditioners held “a fine ding,” all wanting the ten-week one-thousand-mile polar plateau journey to be a success. Syd sent home a YIKLA (this is the life), but the note in the diary he left behind at Mawson farewelled his family:

 On this night, the beginning of what will probably be one of the most important periods in my life, I make thanks to my family for all they have given me. Not only the educational advantages but the whole patterns of our life. To Joy I say ‘God Bless you Darling, I have been very happy and helped greatly by the thought of you’.

Five men, eight dogs, and two weasels left Mawson at 1030 on Monday, 19 November 1956, with “a deafening click of camera shutters and hands wrung to a pulp by well wishers.” The sledging party packed three novels: Oblomov, The Three Musketeers, and The Odyssey. Australia’s most ambitious inland Antarctic exploration was underway, and the weather was lovely.

 

Still waiting

Doug Leckie at the Beaver controls

Throughout October the team at Mawson Base celebrated the return of the sun with higher spirits and more exploratory forays with the dogs and the weasels out onto the plateau. Still, for Syd it was a time of waiting, for Phil had still not approved the Southern Journey.

On Thursday, 27 October, an exploratory flight in the Auster, this time viewing the terrain of the Edward VIIIth Gulf to the WSW of Mawson, found ‘new bays and a couple of new mountains inland. The main interest though was the last thirty or so miles home with cloud down to the deck’.

On the return trip the plane flew into a blizzard. Heavy cloud, drifting snow and strong winds forced the pilot down, keeping visual contact with the ground. Above the clouds, any descent could be straight into a mountain. Without maps or previous visual sightings, a pilot has absolutely no idea when solid rock might suddenly reach into the sky.

The pilot Doug leckie was pushed so far down that they were flying amongst mountain tops and before the ordeal was over, he was flying below the ice cliff height, over the sea-ice in drifting snow, flying on instruments.

Looking out the right hand side of the aeroplane, trying to remember the coastline from the last time they were down there, Syd was calling to Doug, ‘turn left, turn right’, ensuring they kept contact with the coast.

Losing sight of the cliffs brought the double danger of hitting an iceberg and not being able to re-establish contact with the land. The trip lasted twelve hours and Syd went to bed that night ‘on doses of amphetamine and … a couple of Ronicols’.

Pups

Previously at Mawson base Antarctica:

August is a difficult month for expeditioners in Antarctica. From mid-June, the stations are blighted by gloom but the lowest emotional and physiological ebb is in August for, by then, it has been dark and cold for far too long. Syd was pushing ahead with plans for The Southern Journey into the unexplored country behind the Prince Charles Mountains, but lethargy and depression amongst the winterers affected everyone’s interest in putting the preparatory plans into action.

I don’t know what is wrong with the party that just came back. Peter has not been up for two days. Lin and Pat are both decidedly off form and I feel as though I have been beaten till I feel heavy and slow. Jim is the best of the lot of us, at 43 he is marvellous, it would appear that there may be something in this business of an older man standing cold better than the young, though I know that while I keep going I can go as well as any here and better than most, but when I stop I feel really washed out.

The arrival of three litters of pups provided a tonic, and the chubby little strangers were constantly visited and pampered:

Have just been to let Dinah go for a walk. It is rather pleasing outside. Light falling snow with the temperature up to -22°F and the wind down to 18 mph … the pups are going like little champions. Their eyes are now well and truly open and ‘the Palooka’ can walk with the rest.

A cable from Joy about the wedding date was “a bit of a nuisance, don’t quite know what to do,” and news that the Beaver was damaged from constant overloaded takeoffs meant that reconnaissance was on hold. No chance then of assisted expeditions, so they would have to set off from Mawson. “It looks now as though our next move will be onto the plateau with dogs, it will be pretty bitter, and possibly worse still windy, though if we were to sit in base and wait for warm weather we would get nothing done.”

 

When good expeditions go bad.

15 July 1956

 

Robbie’s dream that Syd was about to find his vocation as dog food might have been an omen. The trip on sea ice in the winter dark was difficult.

They really had very little idea where they were going. The maps were poorly sketched and Douglas Mawson’s notes show that he thought the islands were about forty miles from Horseshoe Harbour and ten miles out to sea.

Syd and the team sledged out as ghostly forms in the ethereal gold-tone light, aided by a gentle, lunar-ray path. Within hours they thought they were very clever boys indeed! They were pretty sure they’d found the illusive crystal quartz isles.

They conducted block searches (I might describe this in another post) until a dark, rocky outline against a pale horizon, about twenty miles off the coast, revealed the lost islands—lower in the sea than Mawson’s description had suggested.

Sea spray, whipped into a meringue, had coated the rocks and obscured their edges.

The Douglas Islands were an inhospitable campsite but they must have been very tired for they overslept in the morning, and it was almost noon before they were on the move.

The dogs pulled well, and they made twelve miles due north during the afternoon, stopping at a couple of small islands where they “puttered about and got the camp up and started a star observation at five.” They slept well again, but another shambling, uncoordinated decamping had them departing late again, headed for Welch Island. The journey had already taken a day longer than planned.

Then it all went a bit hay-wire.

Heavy ground drift pushed by fifty-knot winds impeded their progress. For a while the dogs ran well, and the men could see through the drift to the peaks on the ranges, but then the wind intensified. The huskies turned their heads away from the blizzard’s blinding fury and refused to pull.

Two men (down on hands and knees, with the lead dog tethered to their belts) performed as lead dogs. Visibility was less than an arm’s length, and they could feel cracks opening as the sea ice swelled. Syd navigated using Mawson’s notes, and after five hours of crawling on the shifting, cracking surface, they felt the land of an islet beneath them. It was “a most inhospitable spot,” skirted by sea ice with a sheer forty-foot cliff face. But they were off the sea ice.

They staked the huskies out, on their nightline, on the footing at the edge of the rock wall. It took time and energy to climb the cliff and almost three hours to get the tent set up and a primus lighted.

They were high up on an exposed tabletop. Their uneasy slumber was interrupted by ferocious gusts snapping the guy ropes. The tent fell inwards with its corner poles flailing. Outside before he was awake, Syd took a serious tumble and fell heavily on an elbow and knee. Through the hectic night they were forced to go out twice more. Briefly, on Wednesday morning, the wind stopped while Peter cooked breakfast, but then “all hell broke loose again.”

The tide crack in the sea ice opened wide, and the ice shoulder around the islet, where the dogs were staked, started to crumble.

 

 

 

Mid Winter

Every year, the night of 21 June was hallowed. It was the austral solstice—the shortest day and the longest night, midway through the dark winter.

Through the austral dark, the rituals that marked the Antarctic calendar took on deeper meaning.

“Midwinter draws nigh,” Syd wrote on 18 June, with the camp in a fever of activity. The winterers grew reckless and threw open the windows: “unbelievably warm today, got up to -12˚ [Fahrenheit] with a minimum of only -20˚, windows open and bods galloping about indoor, in singlets and shorts. Fine place this Antarctic.”

Haircuts, showers, homebrew-bottling, and rehearsing for the party all added to the excited ferment. On Wednesday, 20 June, the pilot’s suggestion that he and Syd have a friendly boxing round ended badly: “Old Dougie is not looking too good. I guess my punching is a bit uncontrolled. I knew I had split his eyebrow and lip but did not realise I had made such a mess of his eyes and nose.”

In 1956, the solstice moon was round and ruby red, aloft over a windless world.

Celebrations started with hors d’oeuvres and sherry at five, followed by rounds of champagne toasts to dear ones throughout the five-course feast.

In candlelit Biscoe, they sang and told jokes, argued, and solved the world’s problems. They were in Antarctica in the middle of winter, and life in the freezer was thrilling. As the alcohol flowed, one by one the casualties stumbled off to bed. Jock McKenzie, in the midst of illustrating an argument, punched himself in the eye and retreated to his bunk in embarrassment. At eight next morning, the seven who were left went for a moonlight weasel ride and sang some more, then came back and played Monopoly. Two days later, snow fell in drifting flakes, and the whole camp was covered in knee-deep powder.

Winter

 

As the long darkness descends, lethargy disrupts sleep patterns in Antarctica. “It is easy to see why animals hibernate,” Syd noted at the beginning of June. A few days later he added: “With no sun and very short hours of light, it is becoming increasingly difficult to get up each morning. Also without light, the cold seems much more antagonistic.”  Only two days passed before he was conceding in his diary that “I must be a sun-operated mechanism because, with the retreat of the sun, I have found it daily harder and harder to whip myself to work.”

From the first day of winter, the team began to be obsessed with the rituals that mark the passage of time. The Saturday party nights (the ding nights, in Antarctic parlance) were eagerly awaited.  Planning for the winter solstice celebration took over more and more of the day.

In Antarctic stations, the solstice celebration is as important as Christmas Day, even though the winterers are only a third of the way through their expedition. In the grip of the perpetual winter dark, the stations are blighted by low morale. The lowest emotional and physiological ebb is in August for, by then, it has been dark and cold for far too long.

On the first day of Winter, Syd sent off his monthly message to his fiancé, Joy: WYSSA Joy. (WYSSA was Antarctic code for I love you) There was no reply: “probably run off and married a Chinaman,” was his gloomy prognosis. “WYSSA Mum and Dad.” He had used up his allocated monthly communication.

“It’s getting pretty dark here,” is what he would really have liked to have told them.  You can read more about the ANARE codes here

There’s a kind of hush

In the middle of May another scare had ripped through the small community at Mawson base. Inside the tiny dongas, six men slept, although it was always someone’s duty to sleep in the cold porch of one of the huts

On Sunday, 13 May, a polar blizzard tore through Mawson. Most of the men elected to stay in bed, but at five in the afternoon, staggering and disoriented, the station oic (officer in charge) burst into the mess hut, yelling for the doctor.

An hour before, Jock, the cook, had struggled out of a deep slumber, realizing that their hut had filled with carbon monoxide. He couldn’t move, but he could wake Bill and Lin. Lin, the diesel mechanic pulled Bill out onto the small porch. There, amongst the mukluks and pee bottles, Bill declared himself in good health and promptly went back to sleep, as his two companions collapsed.

Jock was still inside the hut, conscious but struggling to move. He wriggled to the door and kicked it open before passing back into unconsciousness. Time passed. Bill came to and managed to get his head out into the fresh air, where he lay in the open doorway, gathering enough strength and willpower to clamber to his feet and stagger over to the mess.

By the time their rescuers pushed their way through the gale to the hut, Lin and Jock had been lying helpless for twenty minutes, in light clothes, with snow forming over them.

A hush descended over Mawson that night.

They spoke quietly of their fear that the year in Antarctica would kill some of them: “A couple of us felt before we ever left that this year would kill some of us and now I am more sure than ever. I only hope that if any of us has to go it will be someone who does not leave a wife and kids and also that we go doing our jobs. Most of us are quite prepared to do that but it would be hard to go like that.”

The dongas had seen better days but they were still there when I visited Mawson in 2008.

The next day, quiet and still in the thrall of a new awareness about their own humbling mortality, Syd and Peter went back out in the field.

Not all heroes are humble!

Sunday 3 March 1957.

A lot has happened in between blogs so I’ll briefly fill you all in: the blizzard passed; the crew worked like dogs and the ship was unpacked; Phil got in everyone’s way with his ubiquitous movie camera, and the Kista will leave tomorrow.

More about the 1956-57 winterers in a minute: right now I want to tell you a bit more about Phil Law, the long term Director of Australia’s Antarctic Research Division.

Phillip Law was a University of Melbourne physics graduate who was appointed as the chief scientist, then as director of science division of the expedition and then as Director of Antarctic Division. The Division was established inside the Department of External Affairs in May 1948. The director was a senior public servant and his budget was controlled by the DEA.

Instantly there was tension with the arrangement because Phil didn’t like to back down and the bureaucrats in External Affairs made it a personal mission to cripple his budget and curtain his expeditions. Even after the Menzies government signed on as one of the eleven original participants of the IGY, Canberra’s commitment was never accompanied by generous funds.

So Phil became quite a talented rag and bone man. Let’s take the example of the dogs:

Ever wondered how Australia came by a team of healthy breeding huskies?

In 1948 a ship bringing twenty-one Greenland dogs to the new French base in Adelie Land was forced to turn around due to heavy pack ice and the captain returned to Tasmania. It was illegal to import huskies into Australia so the dogs were scheduled for destruction.  Phil stepped in with a solution: put the dogs in the Melbourne Zoo under quarantine until a new French station was constructed. Then he told the media what he’d done and of course letters poured in to save the poor dogs. From March to December 1949 the huskies waited and some beautiful puppies were born and it was the pups who were sent off to the Australian research station on Heard Island to breed or, as Phil put it, until such time as we got an Antarctic expedition together.”

He did that sort of thing over and over. That’s how ANARE came by Norwegian huts; the aircraft, and the weasels. But even so, with all his talents, he still had a terrible time doing his job with the ‘bean counters’ as he called the public servants who strangled his budget.

Early in the summer of ’54, Phil dropped off ten men, thirty-one dogs, three weasels, one tractor, and two caravans to establish Mawson Station and spend the winter. By the time he got back to Australia early in 1955, the accountants of the DEA had stepped in and frozen his budget for the following year. Phil’s last visit with Syd was in October 2005. He was small and frail by then (and as deaf as a post), but he still burned with the ornery passion and intense intelligence that had driven him all his life. He still wore that sharp Lenin goatee. He told me about this particularly difficult year with the bean counters:

A lot of the equipment I had to purchase was from overseas. I had to lodge orders before August, before I had the budget. So I was taking a risk of spending government money that I didn’t have to lodge orders in London for equipment to be brought out to Australia for the following year. And when you think how stupid it was; they should have given me authority for the following year’s budget in April. Think of this: if I hadn’t got the money we’d have had ten men down in Antarctica who couldn’t be brought back to Australia. It was obvious they had to be brought back, so we had to have a budget. But the Commonwealth Public Service procedures were so slow. It took all that time to confirm anything.

The tussle was carried out in private, while publicly, the government claimed to be totally supportive of Australia’s commitment to the International Geophysical Year research project and to our ongoing presence in Antarctica.

“Old blokes remembering” is what Syd called this lovely study of the two of them at a mid-winter dinner. Phil was in his nineties by then and they’d been friends for half a century.

Now to get you back to Mawson station in March 1956. I told a little fib.

The Kista has actually left already, on 1 March, 1956.

By then the winterers were well and truly exhausted and very happy to see the ship steaming off through the crunchy sea water of the almost frozen harbour. Syd Kirkby recorded his feelings in his diary that first night after the Kista disappeared over the horizon:

 Thurs 1^st March 1956.

 Well, here we are in our own station, it is our show now. She’s a cold old night. I am lying here in my new bunk, looking through my window and the moon and the shadow of the plateau, blue and clear. For the first time since we arrived the wind died down below 20 knots, just as well, I was beginning to doubt if the wind would ever stopped blowing.

This is your invitation to a year in Antarctica.

Date: 1956.  (It is the height of the cold war so let’s hope we can all get along).

What should you wear?  Warm clothing because Mawson base is very cold and very windy and we’ll be travelling there on the Kista Dan  which is not an ice breaker and it’s not very big.  The sea journey should be over by mid-February and then we’ll spend fifteen months at Mawson Base  so bring solid gloves because you have to help build the accommodation.

Who’s going to be there?   Fourteen scientists, radio operators and mechanics, a cook, doctor, and a four-man RAAF crew.

What is the event? We’ll be part of the International Polar Year in which scientist drawn from sixty-seven nations will study the earth’s gravitational field and Antarctica’s meteorology, geophysics, geodesy, cosmic ray and ionospheric physics, glaciology, oceanography and seismology.

Our year in Antarctica on the good ship Quills will accompany the publication of my latest book Fixing Antarctica, published through CreateSpace. It will be available for purchase in paper and electronic formats from the winter solstice which, as you know is June 21.  Each week I’ll post details about our 1956 crew in Antarctica, about what the papers were saying about Antarctica.

January 2, 1956. Today, after a delayed departure from Melbourne at the end of December  1955, we’re in the pack ice, steaming along nicely towards the great frozen continent.  Around us, in the dense thick pack ice as we drift past seals, penguins, kestrels and skuas, we know that out there somewhere are the other IGY ships. No-one has reached the continent yet, not even the Russians with their massive fleet. Where are they heading? Didn’t I say? They are planning on setting up a massive base called Mirnyy (Peaceful) Station smack bang in Australian Antarctic territory. Were they invited? Nope, but do you want to go to war over it? Interesting times are ahead ….